The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Author

By Noel Young, Correspondent

October 8, 2013 | 2 min read

Verizon, the cable TV and telephone giant which has just pulled off history's third largest corporate deal ever, buying for $130 billion the part of the business from UK's Vodafone that it doesn't already own, is today the subject of ridicule over a TV ad made in the Boston area.

"This is New England, where people tell it straight,” says Boston-born TV star Donnie Wahlberg in a new commercial for FiOS, Verizon’s cable television and Internet service. “No phonies, no fakers, no shortcuts.”

The commercial, titled “Here’s The Truth about FiOS in Massachusetts,” features Wahlberg standing before Boston landmarks: the Hancock Tower, Trinity Church, and in Charlestown near the Bunker Hill Monument.

But the trouble is you can't get FiOS in ANY of these places. " Actually, you can’t get it anywhere in Boston," the Boston Globe points out.

While the service is everywhere in the suburbs - Verizon dug up our street in Marblehead last year at great expense to instal it - Verizon has said it is "too costly" to wire the city for FiOS, leaving Comcast and tiny RCN as the only cable providers for 650,000 residents.

Mayor Thomas Menino has spent years trying to persuade Verizon to bring its service to Boston. That explains why he sounded somewhere between "flabbergasted and outraged" when the Globe asked about the ad this week.

“I think they should put in big letters in the ad, ‘We do not serve Boston. But we’re using Boston as a backdrop, because Boston is a great city,’ ” Menino said.

Meanwhile, Verizon apparently doesn’t get that it has dropped a clanger: “We wanted Donnie to represent us because people know him as a no-nonsense, honest, and likeable guy,” said Verizon spokesman Phil Santoro.

Despite all that Wahlberg , born in the city's Dorchester area, who first achieved fame in the boy band New Kids on the Block, is apparently “a satisfied customer” of FiOS at his home, Santoro said.

When in Massachusetts, Los Angeles-based based Wahlberg can get FiOS in the home of relatives in Hingham - 16 miles from the city. Would you hop into your car just to get a Red Sox match on FiOS ?

Vodafone

More from Vodafone

View all